Corruption is a sickness, and those who do it are mentally damaged: Mogoeng

Chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng has called those who are corrupt “mentally damaged” - a symptom of what he describes as a “sickness” in South Africa today.

Mogoeng was speaking at the Nelson Mandela Foundation on Friday ahead of his keynote address at the 17th annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Soweto on Saturday.

Speaking metaphorically, he told the small audience in Houghton that when a society was sick, one should expect people to take desperate measures, and that to fix society, the sickness needs to be properly diagnosed.

“It’s important to always reflect on the nature of this sickness. We need to diagnose it properly so that whatever medication we need to be prescribing is the correct one. Once you have a proper understanding of the fundamentals around the sickness, you will know how to move forward,” he said.

“When society is sick, when society is desperate, when society is stripped of its dignity, expect desperate measures, expect actions that are irreconcilable.

“The way to deal with the sickness is familiarising ourselves with what Nelson Mandela stood for. He not only signed the constitution into law, but he went out of his way to give guidelines as to what is it the constitution demands from each one of us to do so that it becomes a practical reality.”

Asked about his views on corruption, Mogoeng described culprits as “mentally damaged”.

“You have to be mentally damaged as a person who earns an income to then take that which is supposed to help the vulnerable, the poor and the homeless,” he said.

“The challenges that confront us are unique in certain respects but not necessarily so, generally speaking. Our challenges, depending on which ones you have in mind, seem to be more serious in SA because we don’t manage them the way others do. Human frailty explains the similarity of our challenges.”

He said although we have similar issues to those in other countries, wrongdoing in SA is at an extreme level.

“There was a particular boldness that got injected in wrongdoing in SA. We got so used to wrongdoing and people were minding their own business and we did more than defies logic in neglecting our responsibilities and even in stealing. The scale at which we do wrong things turned to be a bit on the extreme. Otherwise our challenges are sort of similar to what is happening elsewhere,” he said.  

“There is gender-based violence in other jurisdictions. We are worse though. There is corruption in other jurisdictions, there are incompetent people. We just allowed ourselves to be extreme in our wrongdoing, and maybe that’s what we need to highlight now so we can move back to where we were at a faster pace.”

The chief justice also confronted criticism that his outspokenness on socio-economic and political issues in the country can lead to bias in his work.

“Every opportunity that arises must be used to inform ourselves and our people. The notion that a judge speaks through his or her judgments, where does it come from? There really is very little that a judge does based on the constitution that is not political in character,” he said.

“Our struggles are all about the need to secure justice for the people of SA, and you can’t talk justice and not talk about racism, you can’t talk justice and not talk about the land,  you can’t talk justice and not talk about economic justice. You can’t be shallow. You have to identify the dynamics below that which you are articulating.”